Category: Commentaries

Like so many Pakistanis, I was shocked to hear about the assassination attempt at Hamid Mir. As someone associated with many public writing projects and as one who believes in the absolute freedom of the press, to me an attack on Hamid Mir was nothing less than an attack on all of us who voice…

I have spent the last few months recovering from a serious injury. While I was able to carry out the day-to-day responsibilities during this time a lot of my other work had to be put on hold. Writing occasional pieces about Pakistan and Pakistan-related issues, sadly, was one of the activities that I had curtailed.…

AS part of the UNT-NUML Partnership program, I arrived in Islamabad yesterday to start the in-house teaching and training sessions with the NUML (National University of Modern Languages) English department. This is a sort of special return for me: many years ago I had walked the halls of NUML as a young captain studying Japanese…

Last week was the second time in a year that I had the pleasure of visiting the old campus of International Islamic University, Islamabad (IIUI). On both these occasions, I was there for an academic conference, and while there was able to view the most exquisite work of Sham-ul-Islam Shams. Originally from Saidu Sharif, Swat,…

Posted below is the text of my recent interview with The Pakistani Spectator. Please do visit their site and support them. Interview with Blogger Masood Ashraf Raja Would you please tell us something about you and your site? Well, I am an assistant professor of postcolonial literature at the University of North Texas. [More on…

Background: Tzortzis (Greek, lives in London) converted to Islam and is now hugely popular among young Muslims. Pervez Hoodbhoy received a doctorate in nuclear physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and currently teaches physics and political science at LUMS (Lahore). He previously taught at Quaid-i-Azam…

I am not the one who can write columns, articles, or can deliver speeches and lectures. First time ever trying to say what I really feel while staying in Pakistan. I have been reading different articles and discussions on blog “PAKISTANIAAT” for last few months. Many problems have already been defined, discussed and solutions to…

A few months ago, after having expanded The Pakistan Forum into a multiauthor blog, I started looking for good Pakistani blog aggregation websites. My purpose, simply stated, was to link with these websites so that our content could be more widely distributed. I must admit that of all the blog aggregator websites that I contacted,…

Iqbal apologists always suggest that Iqbal wanted the women to have all the rights granted to them in the shariah: how revolutionary is that? It is the job of a philosopher to think on the edge of thought, to go beyond what custom and tradition permit. I started reading Iqbal in eighth grade. Since then,…

On March 23rd, I wrote a brief entry about the veiled woman in a picture of the Lahore Resolution day. You can read that entry here. Until the day I saw the this particular picture, this woman had not existed for me, for she had been totally elided from the mainstream history of the…